Our Mission

The Society’s mission is to:

Celebrate, recognise, preserve, protect and encourage excellence in all scholarly disciplines, and in the professions, industry and commerce, the arts and public service.

To accomplish this the Society undertakes a number of activities, initiatives and projects including support and organisation of lectures, symposia and conferences throughout Wales. Recognising excellence is achieved primarily through the election of distinguished Fellows and awarding prestigious competitive medals and prizes that acknowledge scholarly and artistic accomplishment from, and related, to Wales. The annual election of distinguished Fellows remains the cornerstone of the the Society, as harnessing the talent of this Fellowship remains crucial when bestowing awards, and more generally facilitating the authoritative exchange of knowledge and ideas and promoting public intellectual life in Wales.

Promote the advancement of learning and scholarship and the dissemination and application of the results of academic enquiry and research.

In delivering this mission priority, the society hopes in the future to be able to support the best ideas, individuals and new research across the full range of the Society’s disciplines and interests in the form of a programme of awards and fellowships spanning the Society’s breadth of interests.

Act as an independent source of expert scholarly advice and comment on matters affecting the research , scholarship and well-being of Wales and its people, and to advance public discussion and interaction on matters of national and international importance.

As Wales’s first national academy, the ambition is to provide a voice that represents and promotes the interests of the breadth of the Society’s discipline coverage.

Mindful of its youth, the Council determined that the Society should operate in an efficient and cost effective manner with the range of activities constrained by capacity and strategic and business planning reflecting what is prudently possible given the current small secretariat.